„The two instruments flow together in one, but also the ideas seem joined together and become inseparable. Müller and Marien present a flawless interaction and a consensus that makes music powerful and gives it direction, meaning and clarity, while it is free, open to interpretation, and full of taking chances and risks. […] one of the 2015 absolute best records.“ (transl.)
(Joacim Nyberg, Sound of Music, September 28, 2015)

Named after the beautiful Scottish city of Edinburgh where they recorded it on live stage – at Reid Concert Hall on March 2013, to be precise -, SuperImpose, the bicephalous project by German trombonist Matthias Muller – I already introduced his name when writing about Foils Quartet – and jazz drummer Christian Marien – the first time I heard his hits occurred three years ago on „Nulli Secundus“, another interesting release on Portuguese label Creative Sources where he performed together with Andreas Willers and Meinrad Kneer -, recently submitted this impressive live recording for Swiss label Wide Ear to my aural attention. Their session was splitted into two long-lasting (approx 18 minutes each) parts, whose experimental grip turns the listening experience of their interplay into a possible games of association of ideas and images they could evoke, where they keeps on exploring the boundaries between sound and noise, lack of rhythmical structures and rhythm. They don’t render an embryonic or primeval stage of sound, but it seems they explore the stages that immediately precede sound. For instance, the first ten minutes of „Part 1“ could give you the idea that SuperImpose translated the biological growth of some mysterious entity, so that the disarticulated percussive joints and the noises that Muller make by dampening breath and restricting modulations within his trombone could sound like the somehow ponderous steps towards a proper phrase or sound. Check it out to tickle your imagination.
(Vito Camarretta, Chain D.L.K., August 31, 2015)

In Max Frisch’s “Homo faber”, a novel about an engineer who is trapped in his technological view of the world, the protagonist and his daughter Sabeth play a game while watching the Aegean Sea. They try to find as many comparisons for natural phenomena as possible. For Walter Faber, whose vocabulary seems to be restricted to the world of logical reasoning, it is hard to keep track with Sabeth, whose comparisons also include mythology, the arts and nature.
Playing their game while listening to Superimpose’s Edinburgh would have been a real challenge for them. Faber might have compared the music of Matthias Müller (tb) and Christian Marien (perc) with the creaking of the floorboards in old buildings, with wind hammering against huge metal boards, with flags fluttering in a tornado or with the sounds of the machines in a huge shipyard, while Sabeth might have heard a lonely horn at midnight on a Swiss alp accompanied by an orchestra of owls, the roar of a dinosaur during mating season or the sound of a winter storm blowing over a North Sea island.
In general Müller and Marien try to find a unique sound for what they do, trombone and percussion merge into one sound, maybe into the voice of a huge, melancholic animal. Since 2006 the two musicians, who are both part of Berlin’s highly creative Echtzeit scene, have been rehearsing and touring intensively and they have been trying to develop their own musical grammar and syntax. Standing on the shoulders of giants like Albert Mangelsdorff and Paul Rutherford, Müller – one of the most interesting European trombonists of his generation (and possibly the most under-estimated one) – has always been pushing the limits of his instrument and he has also been exploring the possibilities its sound, for example in his Going Underground project with Chris Heenan and Nils Ostendorf with which they play in caves in order to “to create a space for a fuller aesthetic involvement with the audience by re-thinking notions of musical space and place using the caves as both a site of artistic experiencae and as an aesthetic source from which it springs”. He tries to establish something like that with Superimpose too, and in Christian Marien he has an ideal partner, who uses his “drum kit” not to create any kind of pulse but to invent unusual and unheard sounds (see the video below). The result is music which is extraordinarily clear, intrepid, focused and deep, because the musicians understand each other intuitively. Those who like sound excursions á la John Butcher should definitely give this album a try.
(Martin Schray, freejazzblog.org, June 11, 2015)

Since 2006 Superimpose has been the on-going improvisation concern of Matthias Müller on trombone and Christian Marien on drums. They both are based in Berlin, but of course get around, such as to Edinburgh. They have had CDs on Creative Sources and Leo Records. Their goal is to create one sound from two such diverse instruments. That is an interesting approach, I’d say, and on this recording from March 2013 we can hear that they understand very well how that works. What they do is part and parcel of the world of improvisation and in whatever else they do this shows even more, but when I started to play this record (and before looking at the cover, information and such like), I noted down ‚minimal, dense sound‘ and pretty much that’s what this record starts with: sounds that are very close to each other, like an exploration of a surface through the use of sticks, or objects upon objects, picked up from very close by with a microphone. A low-end rumble, but slowly the two instruments start to diversify. I think that’s something that can hardly be avoided, but that also adds to the beauty of the music. The B-side (both are untitled) here is the one piece that is more improvised in a more traditional sense, whereas on the first side this seems less the case – a more abstract use of instrument, I think, although they don’t always take it to the extreme as some of the colleagues do. This is a very good recording of some highly imaginative improvised music, perhaps not always the ‚one sound‘ they would like to achieve, but nevertheless something quite exciting.
(Frans deWaard, Vital Weekly #986, June 9, 2015)